When community organizer James Clark was 23, he came across a man whose “fervor” for the African-American community, he said, was “unmatched.” That man was youth advocate and community activist, Anthony Shahid.
In the 1980s, Shahid started the Tauheed Youth Group, a mentoring group for high-risk, African-American young men and women. Clark participated in Shahid’s street patrol, where they engaged young people who were caught up in drugs and gun violence and offered them alternatives.
“While not everyone was happy we were there, we were able to change the trajectory of many men and women’s lives,” Clark said.
Clark watched as Shahid set up a pipeline for jobs at Frito Lay in the 1990s.
“I know 50 young men personally who went to work for Frito Lay because of Anthony Shahid,” said Clark, vice president of community outreach at Better Family Life Inc. “I know at least 10 young men who went to college. He blazes a trail through every neighborhood. He’s respected throughout every neighborhood. Anthony Shahid is one of the nation’s unsung heroes.”
From April 6-9, Shahid will host a Tauheed reunion for all the men who participated in the Tauheed group and anyone else whose life Shahid has touched.
For more than 30 years, Shahid has mentored youth in jails three times a week, mentored in dozens of schools, worked to bring thousands of jobs to the community and mediated discrimination cases at several large companies, Shahid said. He’s reached out to families whose loved ones fell to gun violence and police-involved shootings. He also stood by Mike Brown Jr.’s family in Ferguson after Brown’s death and led several protests and marches in the following months.
“I’m mostly known for going dead into the streets, where many people are intimidated to go,” Shahid said. “Places where they are shooting dope, gambling, drinking. That’s what they are doing when I come. I let them know that they are sleeping giants. They are like elephants that are asleep. When an elephant wakes up and figures out who they are, the whole world trembles at their feet.”
The weekend’s main event will be a massive street patrol on Saturday, April 8 from noon to 5 p.m., when Shahid said 10,000 men throughout the country will hit the streets to address the issue of violence head-on.
“With 200 murders a year in St. Louis city alone” – for each of the last two years, there were actually 188 homicides in the city – “you can’t keep your eyes shut and think it’s going to be someone else’s family,” Shahid said.
The weekend will kick off with an alumni social at Vashon High School on Thursday, April 6 and a Jumar Prayer Service on Friday, April 7. Shahid will also host an Honoring Our Heroes awards dinner on Saturday, April 8 at Better Family Life, 5415 Page Blvd. Then Shahid will give a final address on Sunday, April 9.
“I’m excited to see some brothers I haven’t seen in 10-15 years, but I’m more excited about the charge and the challenge that Anthony Shahid is going to put on black men,” Clark said.
One day in the 1980s, Shahid started standing out on the corner of Vandeventer and St. Louis avenues to talk to youth, he said. After a few weeks, he said, about 50 and 75 people would stand there and listen to him – and that became the first formation of the Tauheed Youth Group.
“I never had a spot,” Shahid said. “I would go from this corner to this corner.”
After a few years, community leader Bertha Gilkey gave the group the Cochran Community Center to use as their “Mecca,” he said.
“Back then, Eric Ali and I would walk by ourselves talking to brothers,” Shahid said. “It was a high drug-traffic area. We would tell them to meet at Cochran Community Center, and they came.”
Shahid said he wouldn’t have his passion for community activism if it weren’t for El-Hagg Sultan Muhammad, the director of the Tauheed Youth Group since it started. Muhammad heard Shahid speaking on the corners and was amazed that the youth were standing out in the cold to hear him, Shahid said. So Muhammad offered his help.
“I look at him as a father figure,” Shahid said. “He told us to love black people. He made me love my people.”
Sultan Muhammad, now 85, will also help host the reunion weekend.
Ajuma Muhammad met Shahid while working with his group the Association of African-American Role Models. Seeing as they both worked with disenfranchised, high-risk youth who are prone to violence, they quickly became friends, he said.
“He will never compromise,” Muhammad said. “When companies know that they have to deal with a voracious activist, they know they are in for a real dog fight.”
Kevin Bryant, who met Shahid when he was 19, said Shahid was one of the first black men he had seen that was “a stand-up guy.”
“A lot of my peers had chosen street life,” Bryant said. “I wanted to be involved in changing that, but I didn’t know how to talk to my peers. But I could take them to the Tauheed Youth Program. If it wasn’t for Anthony Shahid, a lot of people wouldn’t have found their way,” he said.
